Naming In The News

Microsoft System Center Morphing from Product to Naming Convention

April 14, 2005
by Scott Bekker

Next week at the Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas, Microsoft will reposition System Center as a naming umbrella to cover its family of management products rather than the specific management suite that would have included Microsoft Operations Manager and Systems Management Server.

"System Center is the product family for all the management products," said Ben Matheson, group product manager for Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager. "The intent was as a product. Now we're morphing that to be a product family -- sort of how Tivoli works for IBM or an OpenView works for HP."

Within Microsoft, the naming convention would be similar to the Windows Server System and the Office System umbrella names.

Microsoft hinted at the change on Wednesday with the unveiling of a name change for the new Microsoft Data Protection Server. Now the backup and recovery product will be called Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager.

The company first discussed System Center at MMS 2003. The suite was to loosely package SMS 2003 and MOM 2004 (later renamed MOM 2005). The suite, originally slated for a 2004 release then bumped into 2005, was also supposed to include a System Center Reporting Server, which would use SQL Server OLAP services to allow administrators to analyze systems data collected by SMS and MOM.

All along, Microsoft planned to continue to sell SMS and MOM independently of the suite.

MMS 2005 runs from next Monday through Friday with keynotes by CEO Steve Ballmer; Kirill Tatarinov, vice president of the Windows and enterprise management division; and CIO Ron Markezich.